In this paper, I show how I have leveraged Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference and her linguistic research on the sexuation of language to emphasize and distill the feminist elements of Isabel Allende’s short story “Dos Palabras.” Additionally, I envisage what translation decision can be made in order to translate the text into English in a language in the feminine.

“Dos Palabras” recounts, in a fabulist style, the tale of a girl, translated in my version as Bella Moonrise, who sells words—speeches, histories, love poems—as a profession, in a civil war-torn Chile. When a band of bandits led by the ‘Coronel,’ hears tell of her abilities, they kidnap her and, then, the Coronel forces her to write a winning speech for him. Though Bella’s speech successfully helped the Coronel obtain support and respect from the people, the two words that Bella gave to him have rendered him apparently insane, and in a final reunion with Bella, the two shake each other’s hand. As such, the story implies that Bella’s two words were ‘te amo’ (‘I love you’).

 Bella’s ability to create a single, living narrative of the historical events of her people comprises a “relationship between subjects”, which corresponds to a language in the feminine, as Irigaray notes in Key Writings (p.85). Bella passes on to her society a relational history that can sustain people in difficulties from war and burnt crops. Thus, the message of Bella seems to be wholly inspired by a reflection on existence from a feminine relational world.

In contrast to that, the Coronel shows a language and a relational world in the masculine, as his selfish aims for the speech and the violent means by which he attempts to obtain this speech from Bella prove. For Irigaray, this patriarchally informed conception of language may appear to amount to objectivity although, in reality, it just bears witness to a belonging to the masculine dominant discourse. This form of language entails “the will, not to communicate subjectively – through exchange of individual information, proper to each, and not subjugated to a priori codes that neither participant in the dialogue can grasp within the specific difference of each individual world – but to dominate all that lives, and to be the master” (Key Writings, p. 78). In line with Irigaray’s linguistic analyses proving that masculine language seeks to dominate the world and master it, we notice that the Coronel believes that the speech Bella gives to him—and, probably, language on the whole—can be a weapon to conquer people and impose one’s own wishes on them.

Despite the Coronel’s masculine relational world is strange to her, Bella appears to be able to apprehend the character of this relational world and to propose an alternative to it. Bella’s reaction to the Coronel’s behavior and, more specifically, her ability to immediately perceive who he is, in contrast to other people’s frightened and submissive reactions to him, implies that, while Bella partakes in a relational world in the feminine, she can perceive a relational world in the masculine. Indeed, the feminine relational world, which privileges the horizontal  subject-subject logic, allows women to perceive the distinctions between the two relational worlds. Such a capacity underscores the value of a logic in the feminine, insofar as this logic can perceive the difference between two relational worlds and suggest an alternative to the dominant, masculine, one.

By subverting the usual hierarchy of power and attempting to create an exchange with the Coronel by her two words, Bella enacts an Irigarayan alternative in accordance with a feminine logic of intersubjectivity. By proposing dialogue and exchange between subjects, she proposes an other relational world to the Coronel. This alternative relational world that the Coronel seems to adopt is not only a relational world in the feminine, but a world that can suit the two sexes and allows the Coronel to leave his selfish goals and accept Bella’s love. It could be objected that the Coronel’s entrance into this alternative relational world amounts to a meeting between relational worlds. Nevertheless, Bella’s proposition of an alternative relational world to the Coronel underscores the value of the feminine relational world capable of suggesting an alternative to the masculine logic and helping a man to adopt it.

Having, I hope, explained the story’s feminine elements relating to language and being and the necessity of resorting to Irigaray’s thought as a lens through which we can begin identifying and understanding these elements, I will consider what could be attempted to write in a language in the feminine the English translation of Allende’s story. To undertake a feminine English translation of this text, I must discern how to properly translate into the feminine the adjectives that describe a sexuate subject. In Allende’s Spanish version of the story, not only the main character is gendered in the feminine but also are  gendered in the feminine all the adjectives used to describe her. This is because, in Spanish, adjectives take the gender of the substantive to which they refer. For example, in a moment of the story Bella is described as “tozuda”, which is translated as “stubborn” in English. In the Spanish story, because “tozuda” modifies a feminine substantive, it must be in the feminine. (“Tozudo” is the masculine version of this adjective). But, in English, the adjectives used to describe a substantive are not gendered as it. It is only an example of the decisions that must be taken to translate the text into English without harming the intentions, especially the feminine, or even feminist, intentions of the author.

References

Allende, Isabel. “Dos Palabras.” Cuentos de Eva Luna. Editorial Sudamericana, 1990, pp. 11-22.

Irigaray, Luce. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Trans. Carolyn Burke. Signs, vol. 6., no. 1, 1980, pp. 69-79.

Irigaray, Luce. “Towards a Sharing of Speech.” Key Writings. Continuum, 2004, pp. 77-97